Welcome to the Boy's Club

Running is not an easy way to make a living—period. According to USA Track & Field’s "Post-Collegiate Distance Runner’s Survival Guide," only 42 U.S. athletes earned more than $10,000 in prize money in 1996 on the roads, generally considered the sport’s richest discipline. Sponsorship is increasingly rare, and even for those few, stipends traditionally top out at a few hundred dollars a month. The best that most runners can hope is for equipment and some travel funds, the generosity of a coach, and a sympathetic employer at their "day job." On top of these practical concerns, many athletes have a hard time staying psychologically and emotionally committed to the sport once they leave behind the structure and support of a collegiate program. As USATF Athlete’s Advisory Committee chair PattiSue Plumer summarizes, a post-collegiate running career is "a daunting task under perfect circumstances."

Compounding the difficulties, conversations with women at various stages of their running careers suggest that female post-collegians face obstacles that their male counterparts do not. As in many fields, these obstacles now appear to be more a matter of degree than of kind. While the sport no longer suffers from the sharp sexism that marginalized women’s running for decades, some female athletes see subtler prejudices and broader social attitudes adding to the already-steep challenges they have to overcome to pursue careers as professional runners.

The Numbers Game

Middle-distance standout Shayne Culpepper lives in Boulder, CO, a town that seems to overflow with athletes. Yet at the track for a hard workout on a June morning, just weeks before the U.S. Olympic Trials, she finds herself surrounded by 15 or 20 men—with not another woman in sight. The day is typical, Culpepper says, which is why she does most of her training alone. "All the women in town are marathoners," she laments. "It becomes very lonely, very quickly."

Culpepper’s predicament exemplifies one of the major practical challenges facing female post-collegians: finding other women to train with. Kim Fitchen, who ran a 32:16 10,000m at Mt. SAC in April 2000, trained for more than two years as the only woman on the Palo Alto, CA based Farm Team before the club’s female ranks grew rapidly in 1998 and 1999. While Fitchen doesn’t think the absence of other women hurt her training—in fact, she still does most track workouts on her own—she says she enjoys the presence of other women at practice: "Just having someone that can relate is nice."

Of course, not all women care whether their training partners are male or female. U.S. cross-country champion Deena Drossin, who lives in Alamosa, Colorado, says she usually ends up training with women in the winter and men in the summer and is indifferent to the sex of the athletes she runs with. Plumer, who ran for the USA in the 1988 and 1992 Olympics, often worked out with men whose fitness matched her training plans. "It’s more important to find a group that’s compatible for you," she says.

Some athletes take this point farther, arguing that women may actually find an all-female environment counterproductive. "I get the sense that women can be much more competitive with each other than guys can," says the Farm Team’s Fitchen. This competitiveness, she contends, can drive some women to overtrain as they race each other in workouts instead of sticking to their individual plans. Plumer echoed this observation and added concern about eating disorders, which, in her experience, can be exacerbated by a group dynamic. "Women have to be more conscientious [about these issues], and that’s hard in a group environment."

For the sport as a whole, however, the loneliness of the female athlete appears to affect some women’s decision to leave the sport after college. College standout Amy Skieresz cited the lack of women on her team as one of her reasons for "retiring" only 16 months after graduation. This dearth of training partners of similar ability appears to create a kind of vicious cycle: Women fresh out of college are more likely to end their competitive careers because they find few kindred souls and a less developed sport, ensuring that the next generation of post-collegians will encounter the same situation.

Welcome To The Boy’s Club

The scarcity of female athletes, and the cycle that situation may create, also plays out in the staying power of the "boy’s club" culture that some consider predominant in post-collegiate running. Maybe the most vivid emblems of this culture are the group houses that many male athletes call home during the first few years out of school. In running towns throughout the country, you can usually find at least one house, full of four, five, or more young men, that serves as a center of gravity for the local post-collegiate scene—a clearinghouse for local gossip, a floor for newbies to crash on, a place to hang out and party after races.

These houses represent an important part of the runners’ post-collegiate survival strategy. The group home relieves some of the financial and psychological pressures they have to overcome to stay in the sport, and the arrangements create a sense of camaraderie that some athletes find helps them train better.

But a number of women report that female athletes most likely wouldn’t consider those houses an option. Plumer describes it as "the fraternity lifestyle"—video games, dirty jokes, grimy kitchens—and says, "Frankly, I couldn’t live like that for a week, and I don’t think I’m that unique." More generally, she says, "You’re not likely to find five or six women who will go rent a house together." And Fitchen notes that, for better or for worse, "Women just aren’t as likely to pick up, pack their bags, and sleep on someone’s couch to find a training situation."

This difference in housing preferences serves as just one example that highlights the subtle ways that female athletes continue to feel like outsiders in the culture of post-collegiate running. This is, it seems, a sport where crashing on floors and partying hard can actually earn a young male runner his peers’ admiration.

A Woman’s Place?

"The biggest challenge women tend to face more than men is saying, ‘I’m a professional athlete,’" posits Canadian middle-distance runner and Olympic hopeful Courtney Babcock.

Babcock’s remark alludes to the challenge posed by broader social expectations about the roles women should play. Women’s professional sports may be bigger than ever, but a number of the athletes interviewed for this article say they still perceive additional pressure, as females, to "get on with their lives" and do something more traditional.

Babcock describes how these attitudes affect the efforts of her all-women team, Mountain West Track Club, to recruit new athletes. "Women are just more reluctant [to be flown out to Montana on a recruiting visit]. It’s just not as ingrained in us. It’s not the way we’re supposed to do things. Guys would do it in a second."

Male athletes have certainly heard the same refrain about finding a "real" job. Post-collegiate running is generally considered a frivolous pursuit, particularly because it rarely brings the fame and fortune enjoyed by athletes in prime-time sports. But as Farm Team founder and coach Jeff Johnson explains it, while young men are allowed—even expected—to indulge in a bit of frivolity, young women, in the public’s mind, are still supposed to behave themselves and settle down. "Women don’t have a ‘boys-will-be-boys’ fallback," says Johnson. "I don’t think they get the same level of encouragement to be athletes."

Ironically, an undercurrent within the sport neatly reverses those roles—and somehow arrives at the same conclusion. According to Stanford All-American Mary Cobb, now finishing her first year as a post-collegiate competitor, the view of some in the track world is that "the men really have the guts to do it, but the women are just doing it for fun." She points to the press around post-collegiate meets as an example, saying that, in her experience, the hype tends to focus on the guys. "It makes you feel like you’re not doing as worthy a thing as the men."

Achieving Critical Mass?

Is the sport changing? Asked that question, coach Johnson says, "It was especially tough [for women] twenty or thirty years ago. And maybe it hasn’t gotten a whole lot better."

Louise Mead Tricard, author of American Women’s Track and Field: A History, 1895-1980, provides some useful benchmarks. She notes that as recently as 1976, the longest distance women were allowed to run in the Olympic Games was 1500m, and the Boston Marathon only had its first official female finisher in 1972. Major national meets included few women’s events in the early seventies, and college scholarships for women’s track and field were a novelty, most having been created only after the passage of Title IX in 1972.

By comparison, the women’s side of the sport looks downright inviting today, but the conversations related here suggest some of the issues and attitudes that marginalized women’s track and field in the recent past still linger.

In spite of that fact, the athletes interviewed for this article point to a handful of women’s and coed clubs—including The Farm Team, the Washington, DC-based Reebok Enclave, and the Missoula, MT-based Mountain West TC—as promising developments that are giving young women better opportunities to scratch out lives as professional runners.

What are these clubs doing that’s making a difference? Mountain West TC, for example, provides a level of financial support through its coach and other private donors and sponsors that its members—mostly on the cusp of national or international class—would almost certainly not receive elsewhere. Athletes enjoy coaching, equipment, funded travel, stipends, even subsidized housing in a common apartment complex—the "women’s" version of the group house, perhaps. As Babcock says, "It’s really supportive, which is just unheard of for women’s running."

The success of these clubs suggests a critical mass may finally be accumulating, particularly when viewed as part of a broader trend toward expanding professional opportunities for women in other sports, like basketball and soccer. Citing the clubs in particular, Deena Drossin concludes that, "In the last few years, it’s become a lot easier for women to make the transition from collegiate to post-collegiate running."

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